Staffordshire and Stoke goes to RiO

Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Partnership NHS Trust has chosen Servelec Healthcare as its preferred supplier for its electronic patient record system.

EHI reported in April this year that the trust had been given the green light by the NHS Trust Development Authority to invest £13m on an EPR and planned to go out to procurement.

Staffordshire procured the system using the NHS Shared Business Services clinical information systems framework, following an evaluation process involving more than 65 clinicians and other staff members.

The other suppliers on the framework includes: Ascribe, Strand Technology and Civica.

Kieron Murphy, the trust’s acting director of operation said the RiO system would enable the trust to “share information about patients in a more streamlined and efficient way.”

“Our clinical teams receive and make referrals to a range of services – both within the Trust and to GPs, mental health and acute hospitals so I am delighted they have had their say in our preferred provider,” he said.

The joint community and social care trust, which provides which provides community health and adult social care services such as district nursing, school nursing, physiotherapy and social care assessments, inherited more than 30 different clinical IT systems when it was established, and a large proportion of clinical records are still on paper.

Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent’s EPR scheme is called ‘Programme Evolve’ and will include all services at the trust. Earlier this year, the trust said it planned to go live in summer 2015.

However, the trust has now said it will “adopt a phased approach” to implementing the system and will start to work on the deployment in January next year.

Gill Bell, Evolve programme manager, said: “We are really pleased that staff have engaged with the evaluation of the new system and the project team will continue to work with them to finalise our business case and start our deployment.”

The system will support more than 6,000 staff delivering care to a population of 1.1m people.